Slow Reading as a Practice of Reckoning with Love and Loss

by Cristina Beltrán on June 23, 2015

Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration is a generous and meticulous work of democratic theory. The book’s origin speaks powerfully to its ambitions: Allen’s decision to teach canonical works to elite students at the University of Chicago while simultaneously teaching the same texts to working-class Chicagoans attending night school demonstrates the author’s belief that no one is ineligible or exempt from theorizing — from reflecting on and thinking with others about the principles and values that ought to guide our individual and collective existence. This democratic conviction — that our collective flourishing is tied to the capacity of individuals and collectivities to think wisely, act creatively, and judge well — is central to the book’s subtitle: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

In titling the book a defense of equality, Allen is taking issue with a tradition in political philosophy that “equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other.”[1] By this logic, freedom and equality represent a zero-sum game in which equality for the majority necessarily involves impinging on others’ freedom. Here, the quest for equality is dangerously linked to the tendency to limit the greatness of some in order to create equality for all. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this as the “leveling” effects of equality:

Almost all salient characteristics are obliterated to make room for something average, less high and less low, less brilliant and less dim, than what the world had before.

When I survey this countless multitude of beings, shaped in each other’s likeness, among whom nothing stands out or falls unduly low, the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be.[2]

For Tocqueville, while democratic peoples have a “natural taste for liberty, their passion for equality is “ardent, insatiable, eternal and invincible. They want equality in freedom and if they cannot have that, they still want equality in slavery.”[3] Authors ranging from Ayn Rand to Kurt Vonnegut would pick up this theme, linking the predilection for equality with dystopian visions of collectivism run amok — worlds where the exceptional are oppressed in favor of the mediocre. Not surprisingly, arguments about equality become particularly heated when dealing with the distribution of what are understood to be limited resources in areas such as education, housing, and employment. Debates over affirmative action are a classic example of this dynamic.

Rather than accept this false choice between excellence and equality, Allen shifts the reader’s focus to what she identifies as the Declaration’s five facets of equality. Central to this claim is the idea that “equality is the bedrock of freedom.”[4] Here, she champions equality as:

co-creation, where many people participate equally in creating a world together.… The point of political equality, then, is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of a community equally in the work of creating and constantly re-creating that community.[5]

In pushing back against the image of equality as the loss of excellence, Allen shifts her reader’s focus to equality as the sharing of ownership in public life. In making this move, Our Declaration reminds us that America’s problem has never been that it suffers from too much equality. If anything, it is the lack of equality that has been (and continues to be) the biggest threat to justice — particularly the inability of all Americans to participate equally as co-creators of “a shared world in which all can flourish.”[6]

This commitment to collective human flourishing is one of OurDeclaration’s most appealing aspects. Describing her experience reading the Declaration with her night-school students, Allen writes:

It’s a cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words became necessary for us; they became our Declaration. Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality, and the value of finding the right words.[7]

Now I wanted to teach them the Declaration itself for its own sake. I wanted my students to claim the text. They were so much in need of it. I wanted them to understand that democratic power belonged to them, too, that they had its sources inside themselves.… I wanted them to own the Declaration of Independence. I want that for you too, because the Declaration is also yours.[8]

In asking her readers to claim the Declaration, Allen is urging them to claim their democratic patrimony, taking up their rightful place in public life. Moreover, in claiming the founding, the hope is that readers of the Declaration will fall in love with American democracy, becoming empowered subjects imbued with a sense of power and belonging. Claiming the text, the aim is that readers will experience a newfound sense becoming a “we” — a people.

This, of course, raises larger questions: What does civic belonging feel like? Must it feel like love? What other emotions might be conjured through an extended engagement with the Declaration?

In posing these questions, I want to build on Allen’s suggestion that to really appreciate and understand the Declaration, it must be read slowly. I believe her emphasis on slow and close reading could be expanded to include the effort to linger over the difficult mix of emotions that reading the Declaration raises. In other words, in lingering over the founders’ words, readers should strive to cultivate a democratic sensibility capable of tarrying with their range of feelings about the founding — feelings such as anger, disappointment, alienation, sorrow, and loss. These emotions are equally essential to making the Declaration ours.

And readers, individually and collectively, should feel conflicted about the document and its creation. America’s founders were a fascinating, brilliant, and compelling set of individuals; their co-creation of a new system of government remains inspiring and moving. Yet these same men whose words continue to inspire also wrote of “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”[9] This is the complicated legacy we inherit — one in which revolutionary acts of freedom and practices of white supremacy are mutually constitutive.

Yet in taking ownership of this imperfect achievement, Our Declaration serves as an invitation to refuse the easy solace of denunciation or celebration. Neither represents the democratic reading practices the Declaration demands, for as Allen makes abundantly clear, there is nothing simple about this short and powerful work.

The author’s discussion of group writing suggests one powerful opportunity for sitting with the Declaration’s contradictions and tragedy. Noting that Jefferson’s original draft was edited not only by a five-member committee but by Congress, Allen describes the process by which the founders deleted all references to slavery while adding numerous references to God. Despite the result — which, arguably, contributed to generations of violence and human devastation —Allen nevertheless characterizes this process as the “art of democratic writing,” a practice that while maddening is “necessary for justice.”[10]

I admit that such celebratory language leaves me perplexed. While group writing may be a democratic art — a messy but important practice that abets compromise — such compromises carry a price. What is democratic, after all, may not be just. And it’s here that, as a reader, I wanted Allen to resist a rush to romance and instead linger over the political implications of group writing.

How shall we reckon with such violent silence? And how do such omissions allow readers of the Declaration to feel pride in the birth of our nation’s freedom while evading any sustained confrontation with slavery and its concomitant sins of rape, torture, and the creation of wealth from stolen labor? In fact, Allen’s demand that we read slowly (and together) seems to invite the possibility of such a reckoning. As she herself notes when discussing how segregationists changed the language of “separate and equal” to “separate but equal,” the Declaration “provided tools for liberating some and dominating others.” But such moments of acknowledgment are worthy of elaboration. For if Allen is right, then we owe it to each other to slow down and truly grapple with “the stuff of tragedy.”[11]

Of course, encouraging readers to linger over both the Declaration’s beauty and tragedy isn’t easy — claiming this inspired and tortured legacy with its echoing inequities should break our hearts. But perhaps in our current political moment, the only morally justifiable patriotism is of the brokenhearted variety.

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In other comments on this series I’ve already linked to both the Frederick Douglass speech “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery” and Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again.” Between those two sources I think that a good deal of what has to be said has been said.

But if people really want to “reclaim their patrimony” rather than reject it, that puts them into the position of accepting something much larger than themselves, so another source may be useful. The following is quoted from David Blumenthal’s _Facing the Abusing God_ (pg. 267):

One cannot forgive an abusing f/Father. This is the classical position of religious thinkers in our tradition from Job to Elie Wiesel. It is also one of the lessons we learn from psychotherapy with adult survivors of child abuse and the holocaust. Rather, we will try to accept God as God is; we will protest our innocence, as our ancestors and greatest thinkers have done. And we will accuse God of acting unjustly, as fully and directly as we can, as our greatest poets and sages have done. We cannot forgive God and concentrate on God’s goodness. Rather, we will try to accept God — the bad along with the good — and we will speak our lament. We will mourn the bad, and we will regret that things were, and are, not different than they are. This face-to-Face alone will enable us to maintain our integrity, even though it leaves an unreconciled gap between us and God.

You link to Douglass’s 4th of July speech but you reject his message. Garrison and many other abolitionists at the time (1852) rejected the Declaration, condemned the Constitution, and advocated disunion. Douglass strongly disagreed:

“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost…
The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age… They loved their country better than their own private interests…
With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times…
Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT….
I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

Bloix: “You link to Douglass’s 4th of July speech but you reject his message.”

I didn’t link to it so people wouldn’t read it. If people actually read “Let America Be America Again”, they’ll also see that it isn’t a simple rejection — that it similarly calls on the dream to become a reality even though it never has been one up until now: “O, yes, / I say it plain, / America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!”

Yes, I personally don’t think that this is necessarily a good idea at this point in American history, after we’ve had this much time to make that dream come true and it’s still failed. But I didn’t mean to imply that Douglass and Hughes were advocating simple rejection.

My grandmother, the daughter of a Civil War veteran (injured in battle — or maybe on guard duty?), the wife of a man whose uncle died as a soldier in that war (of disease, like most — in Kansas, as it happens), and the niece of a man who died at Andersonville…. Well, there she was in Spokane in the 1940’s, though she’d been raised in Mower County, Minnesota and had raised her own children mostly in Montana. She wrote (for what audience I know not, but here I am, and she might have had me in mind as a prospect) a remembrance of her trips by train with her mother every other year as a child from Mower County to Pennsylvania, to visit all their Quaker relatives. (My grandmother’s father, the CW veteran, was a Baptist minister — his father has been dismissed for marrying a Baptist, but Quakers were never shunners….) Anyway, quoting scripture, what she writes at the top of her tale (a wonderful tale — and I even have a picture of her holding a “Quaker doll”!):

“I am not better than my fathers.”

The humility of the reader.

(Let me add: I had relatives on the other side. My attic holds a Union keppie and a picture of that great grandfather in front of a Union tent, but also a tattered drum supposedly beaten by a Virginian Confederate relative. The grandmother I knew best day-to-day was not the one I’ve been describing but my mother’s mother, a Virginian in simple fact and in ways that make me not entirely cynical about Haley — though I remain on guard. My southern grandmother, so leery of her own family’s stories, taught me to be leery. I don’t think she felt better than her fathers. Just a bit suspicious of them.)